Diabetes and its co-morbidities such as cardiovascular disease seriously impact on quality of life. Additionally, 10% of the NHS budget is spent on treatment of diabetes alone. Despite the epidemic scale of the problem, clinicians still lack reliable predictors, that help diagnose co-morbidities early, that serve as bench marks for treatment success, and that determine individual patients' prognosis. We hypothesize that changes in the autonomic nervous system, leading to imbalances between sympathetic and parasympathetic drives, promote the development of diabetes and related morbidities. The aim of this research is to develop a pre-clinical model of autonomic imbalance that allows us to systemically investigate its potential deleterious consequences.